A New Kind of Magic
by Tehan.au
Summary: This is why you keep your muses under control, kids. Harry gets stuck in the past, and learns an ancient and noble art. Unabashedly fluffy and pointless, but in a good way. Now with added present.
1. Chapter 1

Was written as a play on words to poke fun at a story called Harry Potter and Merlin's Reaper or something. It got away from me and became a fluffy, pointless little oneshot. At this point, it looks like it's going to form the prologue of a post-fifth year AU. Still, it stands well enough on it's own.

--

It had been three years since the battle at the Department of Mysteries. Three years since he had been hit in the back with a stunner and fallen head-first into an oversized, stylised hourglass.

Three years since he had found himself on the outskirts of a large field of wheat, in what turned out to be some time long before Harry was used to.

He didn't know the exact date. He didn't really care, either. Not any more.

He had stumbled through the fields, lost and confused and desperately worried about Ron and Hermione and the others back at the Ministry, He had eventually come to a homestead, and stumbled right into the dining room, covered in mud and dirt and bleeding from various small cuts. He tried to get across the urgency of the situation by waving his arms around with a certain amount of near-incoherent shouting, when one of the larger farmhands, with diligence and care and great presence of mind, clocked him across the back of the head.

He woke up three days later with his cuts treated and his head bandaged, in a crude but clean bedroom. The residents of the homestead had apparently decided that he was a runaway that had gotten turned about in the woods, and set upon by some fell creature. Wolves were the classic example, but when there wasn't much to do in Winter but sit around a fire and tell stories, the local woods took on a whole menagerie of fantastic creatures.

He had played along, and claimed no memories of his previous life, supported by the bump on his noggin. He was immediately adopted by the three resident mothers - the collection of buildings housed three separate families, as well as seasonal farmhands - and mercilessly pampered. They spent countless hours discussing between themselves what hardships could make such a sweet boy flee with nought but the clothes on his back, and resolved to pamper him all the more to make up for it.

It took him a while to realise exactly where, or specifically when he was. Well, that wasn't true; the clues had started mounting up pretty much immediately - no electricity, horse and cart the final word in long-distance transportation - but it finally sunk in when someone mentioned Merlin as landowner of every bit of farmland for a goodly distance in any given direction.

His first instinct was to seek out Merlin, and request help getting back to his own time. But, he figured, it could wait a day or two, surely? He was getting a taste of the loving family Voldemort had denied him, in triplicate. The husbands of his adopted mothers had taken to pulling him aside at spare moments and explaining bits and pieces of how to properly tend the land. He had a sometimes bewildering array of adopted siblings, cousins, half-cousins and cousins removed multiple times, the majority of which treated him with respect bordering on awe after a few of his mothers' more wild theories had managed to spread. And apparently literacy and numeracy was something of a treat in these times, because when it came time to figure out exactly how well the harvest had been and how much they owed to Merlin as their tithe, his mothers' husbands had been almost ridiculously grateful when he had revealed he could do it for them faster than they could.

Then the blacksmith in the village along the way had offered to waive the usual cost of repairing wear and tear to the farm's metal tools if Harry would teach his daughter beyond the rough principals of literacy the smith himself knew, and Harry decided, well, it's not like the future was going anywhere. The fact that girl in question, a year Harry's junior with raven hair and deep blue eyes, blushed so cutely when he praised her progress... well, that had nothing to do with it, of course.

A year later, Harry had finished teaching the girl all he knew of writing, but they still met regularly for lessons - a fiction that fooled no-one, but no-one saw reason to point this out, either. Harry had finished growing and developed the kind of physique you could only get from toiling your arse off in a field for hours every day. Harry found tending the fields to be incredibly satisfying, creating and nurturing new life to feed his friends and family.

Three seasons on, he found himself gifted with a small corner of the family's farmlands to tend to himself, with the hinting of more depending how he fared. Come the harvest, his small piece of land was awash with a sea of barley, somewhat to the surprise of the more experienced farmhands. It was a rather common practice to give promising young lads a small piece of land to get all their screw-ups out of the way where it wouldn't do too much damage.

And now here he was, three years after the Department of Mysteries, staring out over fields he had once stumbled blindly through and now knew as intimately as the back of his own hand, surrounded by his family, with further writing lessons with a certain student of his planned for later that day. He hadn't used his wand in near two years now, but worked magic every day, turning a bit of dirt and water and tender care into enough food to support him and his.

Sometimes he felt guilty about leaving his friends behind in the future, but he rationalized to himself; well, he's just taking the scenic route, isn't he? He'll get back there eventually, after all.

Just a matter of time.


	2. Chapter 2

Harry sprinted down the road toward the phone booth, swearing continuously under his breath and ignoring the occasional late-night pedestrian. This would make phone booth number eight, and it didn't help that he was getting more and more unsure as to whether he was remembering the damn number right.

He ripped the phone off the hook and hammered in the number he had memorised long ago, and almost cheered as he finally heard that damned voice reply. "Welcome to the Ministry of-"

"Harry Potter, Rescue Mission, go down already!"

"I am sorry, but Harry Potter has already entered the Ministry of Magic."

"What? Well, obviously I bloody well exited it again! Let me back in!"

"...thankyou. Visitor, please take the badge and attach it to the front of your robes."

The voice sounded rather miffed, and the telephone box started descending without further ado. Harry glanced at the badge - 'Harry Potter (Again); Is Being Very Rude' - before tucking it into a pocket. He was way too late, and he knew it.

Damned if it hadn't been worth it, though.

---

Ten minutes, a quick dodge through the milling crowds, and a painfully slow elevator ride later, Harry was bursting through the door where he had been slammed backwards through time, hoping against hope that no-one had thought to check the spot where the boy-who-lived had disappeared.

No such luck. Dumbledore and Flitwick were standing over the shattered remains of what was once a really large hourglass, and presumably magical, before Harry had smacked into it. Dumbledore had looked up from the wreckage on Harry's entrance, while Flitwick continued inspecting one of the larger fragments. Dumbledore looked more frazzled than Harry ever remembered seeing him, and did not seem pleased at the interruption.

"What do you want?" he asked, already half-turned back before realisation dawned. He turned back to Harry, looking rather surprised.

"Uh... hi, Professor."

---

Poppy embarrassed easily, Harry decided. Possibly something to do with the shock of having the teenage boy you were all motherly to reappearing as a rather lean, wiry fellow of indeterminate but advanced age, complete with a couple days worth of stubble and an inclination to flirt shamelessly. She had blushed wildly and stammered something indecipherable before fleeing back to her office at the most basic of offers from him.

Still, such amusements could wait. Harry had pressed his ear against the door, all the better to hear the discussion going on in the corridor.

"So he's pure Harry? No polyjuice, no ageing potion, nothing like that?"

"Well, there is some lingering temporal magic there, but I'm not entirely sure what effect it would have on him. If I'm right, it wouldn't be ageing him. Pretty much the opposite, in fact."

"Alright. Is he just aged physically, or mentally as well?"

"I, uh, am fairly sure he's aged mentally as well, Headmaster."

"Oh? Why do you say that?"

"Take my word for it."

"...very well, I shall trust your judgement. Once you've finished the examination, send him up to my office. The paintings will keep an eye on him."

---

An hour and a half later, leaving an extremely hot and bothered Matron in his wake, Harry arrived at Dumbledore's office after taking the scenic route through some of his nostalgia hotspots. The few students he had passed on the way had largely ignored him, preferring instead to spread gossip of the event at the Ministry of Magic.

He stopped at the Gargoyle, eyeing it with distaste.

"Look, I'm not playing your guessing game. Open up or I'm going back to the Infirmary to keep Poppy company."

After a moment of sulky silence, the gargoyle reluctantly moved out of the way, revealing the staircase.

"Good. Damn self-important hunk of stone..." He took the steps two at a time, ignoring the faint protests of his knees with the ease of centuries of practice, and bursting dramatically through the doors at the top of the stairs. "Dumbledore!"

"Harry, good of you to join me, my boy. Have a seat." If he was taken aback at the dynamic entrance, he didn't show it. Blasted gargoyle.

"I understand that this has been a trying night for you, and that you're feeling the effects of some... rather unusual magic at the moment. However, Madame Pomfrey has informed me that she could find no immediate negative effects, and that you seem to be in perfect health. Most of your friends have picked up the odd injury, but nothing St Mungo's won't have fixed in a trice. Do you have any questions thus far?"

Harry just bit back a chuckle and shook his head.

"Excellent, excellent. Well, come the morning we'll send for the Accidental Magic Reversal Squad and a member or two from the Temporal Department of the Unspeakables, where you had your encounter. But their job will be eased greatly if you were to tell me what you experienced, so that we can get you back to your usual self without any further ado."

Harry paused a moment before speaking, pondering how much to tell the Professor. Sure, he could play dumb, and let the various ministry workers try to reverse the effects of nothing more or less than old age, but no doubt their 'cures' would become wilder and wilder as they repeatedly failed to 'heal' the Boy-Who-Lived. He'd rather not have to go through that particular ordeal, thank you very much.

"Sorry to say it, but in your conclusion that that little device aged me, you've overlooked a far more prosaic culprit for my aged appearance, Dumbledore."

"Oh? What's that, Harry?"

"Actually being old."

Dumbledore blinked for a moment, before reaching under his glasses and pinching the bridge of his nose. "There are immutable laws of magic that say that what you're about to tell me is impossible..."

Harry leaned back and grinned, revelling in the spectacle of Dumbledore shocked. "Rejoice, Dumbledore, for you are no longer the oldest inhabitant of Hogwarts. Feel young again."


End file.
